The iPhone is quite obviously the ultimate future DJ kit. Assuming you don’t need to take calls whilst mixing that is.
I sort of imagine a future club scene in which there is a whole team of DJs and VJs mixing live with interconnected iPhones, taking audience and even remote input into the mix in some über-creative way.
We’re not quite there yet. If I figure it out conceptually I’ll be sure to put the sketches up on iPhonesque but until then we do have some intriguing first steps towards making the iPhone a true postmodern electro-musical instrument.
Here are some that have caught my eye so far. Note that the links are to their web pages, not their iTunes app store pages.
http://ocarina.smule.com/
I have Ocarina and it’s one of those mind-bendingly awesome things. It’s a simple little instrument app you play by blowing on the iPhone’s microphone.
But that’s not the half of it. The real coolness is in the sharing: you can go to a globe view and see where other people are playing their Ocarinas out in the world, and you can listen in. Truly mesmerizing, and the visualization is very well done.
http://www.yonac.com/software/minisynth/
I have this one as well, and it’s interesting but not so great. Or at least not forward-looking.
The user interface is designed to appeal and be familiar to people who have used a generation of electronic, on-screen synthesizer programs that were themselves designed for maximum user-experience fidelity to physical sequencers and mixers.
In other words, no new paradigms and very hard to make sense of if you don’t come from that world. It its defense I will say you can make some cool sounds with it, and if you’ve ever taken piano lessons you will be able to use its basic keyboard.
At two bucks I certainly don’t regret the purchase, but it’s not an app I use with any regularity, and I also can’t imagine anybody using its cluttered UI in a live performance context.
http://www.smule.com/products/sonicvox.php
The same folks who make Ocarina make a voice-shifter program. It’s fairly primitive at this point and I don’t have it myself, but I can easily picture this type of thing being very useful for live performances. And the Smule people are likely to expand the capabilities over time.
I expect to buy this one just on the strength of Ocarina’s amazing user interface. And even in its early form it should be good for some laughs.
http://loopyapp.com/
Loopy calls itself a loop-based performance instrument, which is already cutting pretty close to my vision of the DJ iPhone Future™.
In short, you have a bunch of tap-based, graphical controls for recording and playback of sound loops, for setting tempo, and so on. It strikes me as a really strong building block for iPhone DJ performances.
A recent TUAW post pointed me to this and a few of the following apps. I don’t have this one yet but I’m seriously considering it, as it looks to me like they are pushing the envelope here in a good way. (But beware, the web site is one of those unreadable, over-CSS-ified numbers.)
http://www.intua.net/products.html
Like MiniSynth, this is an app that tries to please people who think a slider in 2008 should look like a slider from 1965.
It’s a four-track recorder with a potentially cool sample-sharing they call BeatPacks.
BeatMaker isn’t breaking any interesting UI ground, but with the sharing feature it could be really interesting for the composer type. For the live performer it probably doesn’t offer that much, especially with its pro-level price tag. (Sad, that, but true: twenty bucks for an iPhone app puts it solidly in "pro" territory.)
I also found this via TUAW, and I don’t have a copy myself, nor do I particularly expect to get one. But for the right kind of person it may be just the thing.
That’s all I’ve got for now, but I plan to update this site with some cute screenshots and more info on these and other apps. Ergo bookmark if you found this at all useful.